Black Hawk Down

Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Ken Nolan
Starring Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore
USA, 2001

C-

BOYS AND THEIR GUNS
Movie people treat film violence like a prized possession, something they’ve fought long and hard for against the strangling hands of the Hays Code decades ago. But Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down feels just as oppressive as anything that came from that era of censorship and movie “Decency.” Being a new millennium war movie, it has severed ties with those annoying trifles called “Politics” and “Ethics.” Now, war is a video game you can play at home; the American white boys slay the black Somalis and that’s that (there’s one African American among the U.S. soldiers, seemingly for good measure). In the prologue, we see the destitute but it’s not particularly horrifying. All the energy is saved for the never-ending raid sequences and the suffering of our boys. There are informative titles flashed on the screen to fill in the blank lines of context, and we become as disconnected from feeling the violence or understanding its meaning as we would be watching clips on CNN.

I don’t mean any disrespect to the courageous; it is the movie itself that’s a slap in the face. The ill-fated 1993 Mogadishu raid is adopted for flag-waving in the form of another one of Jerry Bruckheimer’s sweat-and-bullet machines; all it does is gush blood. Who are these young male adults who sacrifice their lives to save the world, to do America’s duty? We know them not by name, creed, or personality. And who are the people they are fighting, or saving? We recognize them only by their blackness (calling attention to a fascinating, disturbing return to the imagery from Civil Rights era racism). When humanity is forced upon these seemingly computerized images, they’re clichés from Crane and Remarque.

We’re supposed to get a real emotional kick from the brutality of the war violence. We are assaulted with brief but conspicuous shots of a thumb hanging off a hand and a man whose entrails hang out of the lower half of his body, which has been blown off. To save a soldier’s life, hottie Josh Hartnett reaches deep into a wound spewing geysers of blood. Of course the audience is shocked. Or are they? It’s the kind of shock that doesn’t last, the kind of pain from a selfish, empty empathy. The precious gore is a video game blood spurt, a self-mockery reminiscent of Braveheart’s transformation into Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Someone told me, “You don’t seem like the kind of guy who would like a movie like Black Hawk Down.” She herself found it a big boost for her patriotism. Presumably I’m a nerd who doesn’t like action movies, and it may be that even she could tell that Black Hawk Down is nothing more than a genre flick. But the movie’s conflicts are withered because the macho, model American men fill their roles well: the faceless villains are transparent and unthreatening, while our soldiers are steadfast and undeterred. Bodies may be damaged but spirits are not broken, the way they used to be in the war novels. The Americans turn out to be robots programmed for generalized emotions that don’t get in the way of their ability to shoot a gun. They’re greeted by smiling, cheering black faces.

So what is this heroism Hartnett talks about at the end? Surely it is the idea of personal triumph instead of national or international bravery (since the raid came to no good), and yet again, the movie defeats itself because it is so impersonal and too boring to provoke questions about our nation’s role in the world.

By Andrew Chan [MARCH 28, 2001]